Advertising initiative ads.txt

Technological changes, user expectations and recently formed Better Ads coalition make the online advertising market a real revolution. Transparency and automation process of purchase and sale becoming complicated. Experts said that ads.txt file – placed on the publisher’s website should be the solution.

What is ads.txt?

Ads.txt (Authorized Digital Sellers) is an initiative developed by IAB, whose aim is to prevent unauthorized sales of advertising resources (arbitrage) and to eliminate the problem of domain spoofing. Publisher places on the servers file that contains a list of all companies that are authorized to sell advertising space on its website. Each advertising query is checked and authorized in case of compliance with the information contained in ads.txt.

The key step

Compare to other media industry initiatives, costs of implementing ads.txt is relatively low. It takes just a few minutes for most websites to implement the proposed system. According to BuiltWith, in September 2017, only 1.8% of the 10,000 most popular sites used ads.txt, compare to 44% of websites that use DoubleClick. However, from month to month the situation is changing and more sites in the US, Germany, England uses ads.txt as well as in Poland.

Why does it matter?

Unauthorized and uncontrolled sale of advertising space is a scourge on online advertising market. It can be assume that already at this point, for publishers using Google services and other platforms, the exchange implementation of ads.txt is obligatory. Otherwise, requests from sites that do not support ads.txt will be automatically rejected, which of course, will result in a drastic decrease in revenue.

How to implement ads.txt?

Ads.txt is a text file that should be placed in the root directory of the domain, so path to the file should look like this: domain_domain.pl/ads.txt. The file should contain the names of advertising platform domains, ID and type of relationship. For publishers using only Google Adsense, the contents of the ads.txt file should look like this:

google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

where pub-0000000000000000 is the individual publisher ID.

Publishers who have entrusted revenue optimization to YieldRiser should receive a ready ads.txt file to insert into the site. If you have not received the configured ads.txt file, please contact us.

Please note that you should not add platform parameters that you have not cooperated with before or for which there is no certainty.